Field of the Art
The disclosure relates to the field of, and more particularly to the field of distributing weighted discount to merchants based on subscription tier in a bundled checkout scenario.
Discussion of the State of the Art
In the art of electronically purchasing products, it is common to allow consumer to place an offer on items rather than pay a fixed price (for example, online product portal such as Amazon.com™, AliBaba™, AliExpress™). In such arrangements, buyers typically submit a “best offer” for an item that may have a fixed price, rather than paying the listed price. In such an arrangement, a merchant would then review offers either manually or automatically, and select buyers with whom to complete a sale. There is currently no platform for potential buyers to submit a number of offers on items from a plurality of merchants, using bundle-type pricing to make an offer on a group of items in an electronic shopping cart, and no means exist for merchants to easily configure bundle-type pricing or offer-acceptance rules for their stock. Furthermore, there is distinction between merchants. For example, merchants that may sell a high volume of products do not have creative ways to reduce discount in a bundle-type product arrangement.
What is needed, is a means to enable buyers to easily submit a price offer on multiple items, and for merchants to easily compare a received offer against configured discount and bundle thresholds to determine an optimum arrangement for an offer to maximize profit while appealing to buyers through discounted pricing. Further, what is needed is a means to distinguish between different service levels or discounts applied to different tier merchants based on subscription tier.